Will Trout end up being a catch for the ages?

Teenagers who break into the major leagues are rare these days. During the the game's early days, before the amateur draft and expensive contracts and pitch counts, teams could take a chance on a kid just off the farm. If he turned out to be a bust, the club was out only a few hundred bucks (plus train fare), and it moved on to the next hard-throwing, dead-ball-smashing youngster. During World War II, rosters were filled with players who could grow scarcely a whisker.

These days, when someone younger than 21 makes his big-league debut, it's an event. Baseball fans are addicted to untapped potential, and they want in on the ground floor of the next Star in the Making.

In Mike Trout's case, he's already got some MLB service under his belt, albeit an underwhelming stretch last season, when he was only 19. Now he's 20, and after tearing up Pacific Coast League, he was promoted to the Angels last Friday night. The team parted with veteran Bobby Abreu (and his $9 million salary for 2012) to see what the kid could do, so expect to see Trout in the lineup regularly.

Right now, this is Trout's moment. Check out our slideshow that includes him and other famous players who made a big splash at a young age. Also in there is that other kid, Bryce Harper of the Nationals, the swaggering 19-year-old outfielder to whom Trout will no doubt be compared all season. Check out FanGraphs' comparison of the two players, here.

To whet your appetite for the slideshow, below are two photos that you might call outtakes, but which I love. The top one shows a dressed-to-the-nines Willie Mays (barely 20 years old) at the airport in Omaha, Neb., on May 24, 1951, preparing to depart for New York City and begin his Hall of Fame career with the Giants.

The second photo also is from 1951 (April 11, to be exact), and it shows Mickey Mantle, then a 19-year-old rookie with the Yankees, talking with an 18-year-old kid named Roger Craig, who was a football player at a rival high school the Mick had played against in Oklahoma. Look how big that dude is! The larger-than-life Mantle was only 5-foot-11, but this Craig kid looks like something out of a fairy tale.

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